The Student World prior to 1968

Although I had been studying at the Sorbonne since
1961 – a bit of an oddity in those days for somebody coming from a
modest (though not uncultured) background (that year, if memory serves,
there were 160,000 students, or around a fifteenth or twentieth of
today’s numbers). Leaving the regimentation of high school behind, my
expectations of the Sorbonne were very high. I was quickly disabused by
the teaching of History and Social Sciences which even then was mostly
in the hands of communists and “fellow travellers”, with the occasional
exception. For instance, in my propedutique (first year on
campus back then) year, my main History lecturer in the Sorbonne’s huge
amphitheatre which held anything up to 1,500 students, was Jean Bruhat,
renowned for his editorials in L’Humanite back in 1937-38
endorsing the death sentences passed on those accused in the Moscow
Trials – he had gone so far as to refer to them as “slimy snakes”! Just
imagine this mini-“Goebbels” delivering lectures on historical
objectivity! On the other hand, as Philosophy lecturer I had
Jean-Francois Lyotard, a brilliant Hegelian and outstanding educator (I
still have my roneoed copy of his “Saying and Doing”) who was at that
point a member of the group (a breakaway from Trotskyism) around the
review Socialisme ou Barbarie (as was Castoriadis) before splitting away with Claude Lefort to launch the bulletin Pouvoir ouvrier
(singular in the minds of these great intellectuals!). We were on good
terms personally, he and I: he used the familiar form of address with
me which was a sign of equality and respect for the 19 year old that I
was at the time, well used as I was to “academic mandarins”, full of
their own “knowledge” and full of themselves. He appreciated my
dissertations, punctuated with references to workers’ councils (he told
me that I wrote like Daniel Mothe, the group’s token worker, who was
working at Renault at the time: and even though he never gave me any
more than 11 or 12 marks out of 20, that was top marks in his eyes!).
He was probably intending to recruit me into his group and he supplied
me with a collection of the S ou B review and then one day he asked me
if I was a marxist? When I replied that I was not, he expressed the
opinion that that was “a pity”. To which I replied that one did not
have to be a marxist in order to offer an economic explanation of
History, that Marx had “wound up” the First International and that I
held deeply-anchored libertarian views. In fact, I had accumulated a
sound anarchist culture through the classic authors (Bakunin,
Kropotkin, Reclus and many others whom I had stumbled across thanks to
the sterling efforts of my friend Louis Louvet, the publisher of Contre-courant and distributor of a huge store of Temps nouveaux pamphlets and books, Jean Grave writings and Bidault’s La Brochure Mensuelle.

As fate would have it, after ‘68, having become
the darling of the highbrows, JF Lyotard came up with “libidinal
economics” and argued that Marx had written Das Kapital with
one hand whilst wanking with the other! Belated though it may have
been, this was quite amusing and typical of the intellectual
masturbation of all of those who looked to that bearded ++++.
Paradoxically, towards the end of his days, a few years ago he
delivered himself of an unbelievable paean to Andre Malraux! We ought
to point out where other S ou B stalwarts ended up: Castoriadis became
an erudite author, university lecturer and psycho-analyst highly
regarded even by the “leftist Le Monde set”. Claude Lefort
became a lecturer at the College de France! And Daniel Mothe, “working
man” turned into a highranking official with the CFDT trade union.
Superb and pitiful promotions! And let us say nothing of the ‘leftist’
“wooden-tops” who ensconced themselves in every conceivable
ramification of the state, especially after 1981. Political activism –
especially in the “socialist and pseudo-revolutionary” lists – as a
springboard to professional success. A ploy well known to all social
“climbers”. What a far cry from the “refusal to ‘make it’” preached by
the revolutionaries of yesteryear!